Over the last few years, I’ve had some interesting revelations.
Times have changed.
I am ‘long in the tooth’ enough to have long ago realized that nothing is constant except inevitable change, but there are some things – some things of value – that I’ve seen willfully discarded. Such as life-long friendships over disagreements on political views and so much common sense that it actually makes me wonder about the future of America.
That, is something I never had a concern about until recently.
For example, in 2020, for the first time in a dozen Presidential elections, going back to Carter/Ford in 1976, I felt like my vote wasn’t counted. Not because I think it wasn’t, the operative words in that last sentence being “felt like” (not know), but because belief in statistical science has to be totally suspended to believe that our current president won more votes than any presidential candidate in history. Putting it mildly, the odds are about the same as you winning the lottery and then getting eaten by a shark later that day.
Sure, quoting the late comedienne Judy Tenuta, “It could happen”. But did it, really?
Yet, despite my qualifications in actuarial science (the use of mathematics, statistics, and probability principles to anticipate the outcome of certain future events) no matter what facts I present, no one’s mind will change, generally, because we’ve lost trust in each other as a society. Numbers are easily manipulated if you have an agenda. And P.T. Barnum was right, there truly is a sucker born every minute and apparently has been for a multiple decades.
I find that too many people I meet these days are the perfect description of a quote most often attributed to Mark Twain:
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
I (personally) ignore most of the politically oriented insanity I see and hear as just ‘noise’, but when the prayer that started the first session of the 117th Congress of the United States, back in 2021, ended with the word “awoman” – regardless of the fact that the word “amen” is Latin, has zero to do with gender and loosely translated means “so be it”, then just days later I got an message on my Facebook feed that asked me to “sit down when [I] pee” to make transgender men feel more at ease in public bathrooms – it’s apparent, we, as a nation, have allowed a noisy few to change our course to collective lunacy.
Despite a 97% survival rate of the Corona virus small businesses across the US were forcibly shuttered while big businesses stayed open, and even though we now know for certain that it began in Wuhan, China and came to the US from China, God forbid anyone, even jokingly, call COVID-19 a ‘Chinese virus’ when there is no problem with still calling the 1918 H1N1 influenza pandemic the ‘Spanish flu’ even though the very first reported cases, anywhere in the world, of what later became known as the Spanish flu, were soldiers HERE IN THE US – at Fort Riley Army base, in Kansas on March 4, 1918, MONTHS before the first case was publicized in Spain.
Interestingly, we don’t hear much about COVID-19 anymore. Likely because vaccinated people now make up the majority of the population – 79% of adults in the US have completed at least the primary series. However, the latest CDC data shows that vaccinated people now also represent the majority of COVID-19 deaths. Oops. And now we find out that side effects of the vaccination, for some otherwise healthy people, are actually worse than the virus itself. Oops again.
When warning labels on a chainsaw recommend not holding the business end while it’s moving, letter opener packages suggest using safety goggles and Superman costumes come with the very clear warning that “This costume does not enable flight or superhuman strength” and RedBull gets sued for false advertising because it doesn’t actually give you “wings” and the plaintiff wins…
Common sense is no longer “common”.
Flat out lying and hypocrisy have been accepted as a standard political business practice.
Traditional values are viewed as outdated and oppressive to those less advantaged.
Up is down, down is up and gender is a spectrum, not a binary.
All that actually makes me happy I’m now a “Senior Citizen” because even though I plan to live to be 150, if this great country of ours goes the way of the Titanic before I kick the bucket, I have fond memories of when I got to play in the dirt and forests and fields and nearby creeks from sun up to sun down, miles from home without adult supervision, ride a bike without a helmet, drink from a garden hose, wave around realistic looking toy guns without fear of getting shot, know the sex of anyone I spoke to without question and party my ass off when no one could record it all for later viewing on the internet.
If you didn’t…sucks for you.
Well, at least you can still get rich if you want to. See below for help with that.
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